MARKING THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI (Scholarships available)

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Well, we have, counting tonight, eight sessions together to study a text of Dogen. This is a great thing; what a luxury, you know? … For me, there’s nothing more wonderful than having the time and the circumstances in which to slowly savor and study a profound spiritual text. This is one of the great things that human beings have devised to do together. Throughout the ages, people have written as deeply as they could about what they understood to be the most important and most profound aspects of what it means to be human: to live, to die, to wonder, to be awestruck by life and the world.

And then, those who have written most saliently and profoundly about this, their texts have been studied, for generations and generations, by others who share the same feeling for life and are trying to expand that feeling and that way of living that’s expressed in the text. But who has time for this? Nobody. Everybody’s too busy! And if you did have the time, you wouldn’t be reading one of these texts, you’d be catching up on the presidential election or who’s winning the ballgame. So, people very seldom do this, you know? They do it still in some places; in monasteries and temples it’s still done. But even there, everybody’s busy taking care of the guests and the buildings and so on. So, it’s a precious opportunity. I value it a lot myself. I wouldn’t do it either if it weren’t for you… If I was by myself at home I’d be doing something else probably. So I appreciate the opportunity to take our time, we’re not in a hurry. We aspire to get through the whole text. But maybe we won’t. Probably we will, but we’re not in a hurry…

I think it would be a good idea to begin all our sessions with sitting so we can attune ourselves to the text… And we can do that best by doing sitting practice. Maybe, once in awhile, in the sitting we can use the sitting practice to contemplate a phrase or something that Dogen is writing about. But in general, to sit and be present and feel our life at the beginning of every session I think is a really good idea. It will make us appreciate what Dogen is writing about more.

There are lots of ways of reading, which I think we’ve all forgotten. We think reading is reading. But no. Reading isn’t just reading. There are a lot of different ways to read as many people are now noticing. It’s kind of a shame that now we’re losing the ability to read; many aspects of reading are now all but unknown. You can’t really read Dogen unless you read contemplatively. You can’t read Dogen for the topic sentence and the message. Anybody who tries to read Dogen like that, like the way you read the newspaper or even the way you would read a spiritual book because all spiritual books nowadays… in the internet age—they’re all written in a punchy style. So, they’re not meant to be read contemplatively either because the publishers would never allow it. They would say “No, you can’t write like this,” and they’d take the red pencil and make it all different until they got it to where they knew their readers would stand for it.

So, we’re going to have to read Dogen in a different way. We’re going to have to read contemplatively. And that means, we’re going to have to not assume that we can understand what we’re reading. Now somebody might say, well, what would be the point of reading if you didn’t understand what you’re reading? Well, the point is, that you would come to understand, in some way, what the text is saying. Because if the text could be accessible on first reading like everything else we read is, what would that mean? That would mean that the text is nicely meeting our preconceptions; it’s nicely meeting the mindset that we have come to the text with, and it’s reinforcing that mindset. Thank you very much for telling me what I know, more or less. Good, I feel better now. I have a few facts and figures and a few perspectives that reinforce what I already know. Dogen doesn’t have that mission. He’s not trying to tell us what we already know. He’s not trying to trick us or be, on purpose, impossible to understand for the sake of being impossible to understand. He’s not trying to do that. He really is trying to express himself as clearly as he can, saying what he really wants to say. And what he really wants to say can’t be said in the that way we usually read and we usually understand. And that’s the reason why Dogen appears, at first, to be difficult.

So, those of you that might have received this text in advance or looked at it before this moment, maybe you’re thinking, what a weird text, or like, what is he talking about? But he’s not trying to be weird or difficult on purpose. He’s just trying to say what he wants to say and, of course, he’s saying that in a tradition. He’s steeped in Zen literature and Buddhist literature in general. So he’s speaking based on those tropes and based on those ways of looking at the world. And taking that material, he’s trying to deeply express his view of life. So, I’m hoping that by the time we’re finished here, we will have the feeling that we’re understanding the text. Maybe not in a way that we could paraphrase or explain it, but in a way that we could feel it. And in a way that we could feel our lives differently based on our encounter with the text.

Excerpted from a dharma talk given at Upaya Zen Center, October 18, 2012, “Awesome Presence: Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers Sutra Part 1.” Listen to the full podcast recording of this talk and the eleven-part Awesome Presence series.